Microsoft Acquires MessageCast

As with many acquisitions that happen early in the life of a company, this one is bittersweet. On one hand we are very happy with the deal and excited for the entrepreneurs (Royal Farros and Dave Hodson) and their team. On the other hand, we were enthusiastic about the long term prospects for MessageCast and were looking forward to a continued working relationship with a group of folks we know and love working with (Heidi and Royal go back many years as they were partners in T/Maker – the folks that brought us clip art.) I was the backup partner on MessageCast and delighted in badgering Royal and Dave about RSS whenever I had the opportunity.

This is a completely logical deal for both Microsoft and MessageCast. They had been working very closely together around the MSN Alert service. MessageCast had integrated MSN Alerts with RSS and build an extremely publisher friendly service to enable a publisher to distribute his RSS feed (or any other data feed) via Microsoft Messenger. MessageCast was beginning to work with other IM services (the usual suspects) but had such significant IP around the MSN Alert SDK it made perfect sense for Microsoft to integrate this into their Alerts business.

Every year, Microsoft hosts a VC Summit involving 100 Microsoft senior executives and 200 venture capitalists with a stated objective of sharing the strategic roadmap of the company, highlighting the famous

http://furrier.typepad.com John Furrier

Brad: through you I and Heidi I met Messagecast. I think that they pulled “a VMWare”…sold too early. They had a great team and the market is just starting. That being said a liquidity event is good too.

[A very belated post] Microsoft acquired the company I co-founded last Wednesday. Kudos to everyone involved, as a lot of folks worked hard on hammering out an agreement and keeping things moving forward. (Brad Feld from Mobius has a few…